alias Bruce.

Foamy the Squirrel on Gay Marriage

Foamy the Squirrel shows Barack "now that I've thought about it..." Obama how to grow some, uh, nuts on the issue of gay marriage.

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist for sharing Jack Cluth's video. 

Gunter Grass, Dave Eggers, Germany, Israel, Iran, and "What Must Be Said."

So Dave Eggers wins the $53,000 Gunter Grass Award for his book about American abuse of a Syrian-American humanitarian. And just before the scheduled award ceremony, Grass – who has admitted to having been in the SS in Nazi Germany – publishes a scathing poem about Israeli nuclear proliferation and aggression. Uproar ensues. Israel bans Grass from entering the country. And then Eggers announces he'll refuse to go to Germany to accept the award. He'll accept the money, though.

Here is a link to the Grass poem, titled "What Must Be Said."

And here is what must be said about this whole conflagration:

1.) Kudos to Grass. His poem is truthful, and more intellectuals of his celebrated stature need to rise up and declare in public – against the waiting accusations of anti-Semitism – that the contemporary Israeli regime has in some ways become the wickedness against which it claims to stand.

2.) It is horribly ironic but not shocking that the Israeli regime, over its lifetime, has plunged into such a long moral fall. Any psychologist who specializes in developmental trauma will tell you that awful suffering often later translates into exaggerated, delusional, or even sociopathic aggression.

3.) Grass's SS involvement as a young man hardly disqualifies him from condemning Israeli behavior. Grass has owned and rightly been culpable for his actions. One can argue, in fact, that Grass's first-hand knowledge of obedient or self-justifying groupthink informs his outrage at what he now sees in some Israeli trends. Not long ago I had a conversation with an Aryan German, who came of age during the Holocaust, who now recognizes much of what he saw in late-1930s Germany in early 21st-century America.

4.) Grass's poem is lousy as a poem. It's barely a poem, actually; it's more like a proclamation with lots of line breaks. But that's not the point anyway. Nobody cares about it as a poem. We care about what it says. Presenting it as a poem in a publication, actually, was a good move on Grass's part: it assured that his message would be disseminated intact, in its entirety. Had Grass simply called a press conference and issued the message as a statement, it would have been sound-bited and paraphrased beyond recognition.

5.) Eggers's refusing the personal tribute while accepting the money stinks to high heaven. His excuse in published reports that the controversy had become too much about Germany and Israel and Iran just doesn't hold water. A response of integrity would be to either be okay with the moral context of the award and to accept the prize and the money, or to not be okay with it and to reject the prize and the money. You can't have both. Good luck washing those dirty little hands of yours, Dave.

After having read Mike Daisey's March 25th blog post about his Apple monologue disaster,

and after having listened, in its entirety, to the March 19 talk he gave at Georgetown University about the scandal; and having listened, also in their entirety, to the original show he did on This American Life and the later TAL retraction show on which he was doggedly questioned about his looseness with facts, a few things appear clear to me:

1.) Mike Daisey is a mess. I think he'd be more than willing to admit this. In fact he pretty much does admit it, especially in the Georgetown talk and on the TAL retraction show. I think most of us, in his situation, would be a mess. He has been all over the place in his responses to the scandal: he was shell-shocked and in denial in the TAL grilling on the rules governing his art; he was defiant and disingenuous in his March 19 blog post about how it was "art," not lies, that moved his audiences (I have only heard the monologue portion that aired on TAL, but the parts I found most emotionally moving – such as the anecdote about the man with the ruined hand and Daisey's story about his personally having met 12-year-old workers – now appear to have been fabricated or exaggerated); he is earnest, repentantly self-effacing, and politically passionate about the untold stories of Chinese workers in his Georgetown talk; and now, in his March 25 blog post – faced with a quote from one of his past interviews in which Daisey clearly lays out the rules for theatrical truth-telling – he openly admits how he broke them in his Apple monologue and he seems to have let go of the need to artistically defend the license he took. His trajectory seems to be toward acknowledgement of what he did and calling even more insistently for addressing the much greater cause of justice and media attention for Chinese workers. He clearly got in way over his head with TAL, and I'd advise pundits to take care in trashing him. You know what they say about glass houses.

2.) Daisey didn't need to lie or misrepresent his experience in order to succeed with his monologue. That's the awful irony of all this. Between the things he actually experienced on his trip and the known facts about incidents and outrages in Chinese manufacturing for Apple, Daisey could have constructed and performed a monologue that was riveting, devastating, and, as TAL asked of him, bulletproof against the predictable attacks and questions from Apple and corporate media. In his Georgetown talk, Daisey says about his panicked deception of TAL's producers, "I should have been wiser. There must have been a path that would have worked [in being able to air the monologue without misrepresentation]. I don't know what it would have been, though." I could be all wrong, but I have a suggestion: had Daisey been honest with TAL, they might have instead constructed a show about how a gifted writer and actor with a compelling story found himself getting carried away with the telling of the story, and how he finally came clean about this under the pressure of doing a national radio broadcast. And Daisey could have performed a monologue, on TAL, about what he truly saw in China and what he didn't see, and how and why he had gotten carried away in some of his monologue lines, and what is actually documented as happening in Chinese factories, and how as an apolitical privileged American techno-geek he found himself devastated, disoriented, and evangelicized by the raw power of what he witnessed and what he learned from others about where his iPhone comes from. Sure, maybe that idea wouldn't have flown. All I can say is, as a TAL listener I'd certainly tune in to a show like that. But in any case it's water under the bridge. What is clear, and what Daisey clearly knows, is that his monologue doesn't (and won't) need misrepresentations in order to work as theater.

3.) Daisey is a great talker. He is a brilliant talker. He is such a good talker, in fact, that, given the glibly convincing way in which he represented untruths as real events in his monologue, I am not sure I believe much at all of what he now says. I'm not sure I believe his explanations for things he still insists he saw in China that his translator says didn't happen. I am not sure I believe his tortured account of why he did what he did and how he now feels about it. I am not sure, actually, that I believe anything Mike Daisey says. This is a real problem for me; there is much of what he now says that I want to believe. But I'm having a lot of trouble doing so. I don't know what to do with this. But I needed to say it.

4.) When Daisey says that he should not be the big story – that Apple and China should be the big story – he is absolutely right. I do think he understands that his dishonesty in the telling of such a heart-rending, high-stakes human story has become a hugely emotional public event partly because his story itself so deeply rocked our world as spoiled American gizmo-users, and partly because a lot of us, including me, feel an angry sense of his having betrayed and manipulated both us and the issue of workers and Apple. But Daisey is correct when he says it's an atrocity that the news cycle is dominated by his scandal rather than by the human suffering embedded in electronics built for us by people in China who we will never see.

That is why, as Daisey suggests, you need to read the New York Times series on Apple's suppliers, and listen to the NPR story about an explosion at an iPad plant that workers say happened just hours after Apple inspected the plant, and look at the research by NGOs  regarding cruel working conditions and worker suicides at Apple supplier plants in China.

And that is why, unless there is something of huge public importance related to him in the future, I will not blog about Mike Daisey again.

Update re: the case of Mark Byron, who a judge punished for bad-mouthing his estranged wife on Facebook:

Byron emailed me yesterday in response to my recent post, in which I criticized his judgment in trash-talking his soon-to-be ex-wife on his Facebook page while I also pointed to the real freedom-of-speech questions his case raises. His email to me was polite and reasonable, and so I am reprinting it here (minus his contact information), followed by my own take on what he says.

MARK BYRON'S EMAIL:

Bruce,

Thanks for taking the time to write about me on your blog.  I'd like to encourage you to take a second look at my story, along with the facts of my case.  You make some great points-  that this is in fact a very interesting case to everyone.  Some of your statements about me are a little unfair, though.  I encourage you to take a look at the now public posts on my Facebook wall, for starters.  www.facebook.com/byronphoto - there, you'll see the confession email from the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting.  I agree with you that the site is not as public as some think that it is - however, I have more than 12 years in IT background.  I am an MCSE for example - and understand a great deal about privacy and security on computers as well as on Facebook.  I utilize groups on Facebook and used every bit of available security that Facebook has to offer.  Please consider writing a follow up once you've had a chance to take a closer look at my story.  Feel free to call me or write me with any questions you may have.

Sincerely,

Mark Byron

MY TAKE:

Byron, a New York photographer, is clearly staying on top of his story online, and I commend him for that. As I wrote previously, there is no way for we bystanders to know how right Byron may or may not be in having called his wife evil and vindictive, or how right she may or may not be in having filed for a protective order and claimed that the comments on his Facebook page frightened her. That is between the two of them and the court. What is clear, though, is that Byron badly overestimated the privacy that Facebook allegedly affords him and his FB "friends." Whatever his IT background, it appears that he still holds this mistaken belief, as shown in his statement in his email about "the fellow who 'gave' my soon-to-be ex-wife his login credentials to Facebook which allowed her to see my private posting." Truth is, in real terms there is no such thing as a "private posting" on Facebook. Facebook is so hackable that, with or without someone's willingly handing over a person's login info, anything posted there is at the mercy of anyone who has sufficient skills and ill intent. Posting anything on Facebook in the belief that it will be seen "only" by your "friends" is excruciatingly naive at best. It is a mistake that I hope and trust Byron will not repeat. Meanwhile, the issue of what a person has the free-speech right to say and not say on Facebook remains a legal football. With users' erratic learning curve on the limitations of social media privacy, the technical reality that all Facebook speech is de facto public doesn't necessarily mean that FB users who post provocative things intend for them to have meaning beyond their "friends" circle. But right now judges have tons of room to interpret, and make, law on this. Which is why the smart thing for we users to do is to treat such media as if they are entirely public.

The controversial Doonesbury abortion sonogram comic strips,

which many newspapers are afraid to run, can be seen in their entirety at Gawker.com, which is posting PDFs from the Poughkeepsie Journal. The Journal is withholding the strips from its print comics page but is posting them online with an explanation, which is at least something. Here, from Gawker, are the two the Journal has run so far. The newspaper, and Gawker, say they will run the series through to completion. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

The problem with the Catholic Church isn't Catholics. It's the Catholic Church.

ITEM: At her mother's funeral last week, in front of all of the mourners in the cathedral, the daughter stood before the priest to take communion. The priest looked at her, covered the wafers with his hand, and told he could not give her the body and blood of Christ because her lifestyle is a sin in the eyes of God. See, her partner of 20 years, who was standing beside her, is a woman. They're lesbians. So this bigot dressed up as a man of God devastated her and her entire family in their hour of deepest grief. And he then, without warning, skipped the burial. His name, because he deserves for it to be printed here, is Rev. Marcel Guarnizo of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, MD. If there is any justice in the Universe, he will come back in the next life as a gay man. Not that we have any way of knowing his orientation now.

ITEM: After a years-long struggle, Maryland finally legalized gay marriage this week. Amid the battle, a top public figure declared that churches should never have to grant marriage rights to gays. Who was this? Why, Edwin O'Brien, the former Archbishop of Baltimore, who was recently promoted to The Vatican.

ITEM: In one of the largest Catholic churches in my hometown of Rochester, NY, a large number of parishioners broke away when the established parish, backed by threats from the Archdiocese bosses, forbade recognition of gay unions or of women taking charge in the pulpit. The breakaway church is now a large and thriving Catholic congregation – Spiritus Christi Church – that celebrates gay unions, has a strong woman reverend in the pulpit, and runs a slew of health and service programs in neighborhoods and in prisons. (Pop quiz: which church – the Archdiocese-approved sanctuary of bigotry or the rebel house of open-hearted love – do you think Jesus would prefer?)

I have an old friend who was raised Catholic and whose mother was devout in her faith and her dedication to her congregation. One of the things I learned from watching her, as I have also observed in every other religion I have personally witnessed, is that the most corrupt, destructive, and amoral force in religion is generally the bosses and the operatives, not the parishioners. Name the issue affecting Catholicism, for example – divorce, contraception, gay rights, abortion – and polls show that rank-and-file Catholics are light-years ahead of the robed and brutally hypocritical executives who run the corporation. Which is why ordinary Catholics are among those supporting the gay rights law that Baltimore's Catholic CEO promises to torpedo.

Like leaders of other global enterprises, church rulers are resolutely bringing up the rear when it comes to matters of societal morality.

Memo to gay marriage opponents:

Go ahead and waste your precious years on this earth fighting gay marriage if you want to. Poison yourself with meanness. Suffer in fear. Bring discredit and shame upon the God you claim to follow. Bash your head against the thickening foundation of gay rights until you've beaten yourself senseless. It's your life to waste. 

Allowing gay marriage is going to be the law of the land. You cannot stop it, and you're in hysterics because you know you cannot stop it.

Last week my state, Maryland, became the eighth – with many more to follow – to legalize the right of gays to marry. The meanest of the mean, like you and the Cardinal of Baltimore, now promise to give voters the opportunity to re-lower themselves into the dark ages via a referendum on repeal. Ultimately it won't matter. No matter the number of state referenda to repeal or not, no matter the outcome of the inevitable ruling by the current Supreme Court, in the end, no matter how long it takes, as with slavery and denial of women's voting rights, the irrefutable movement for plain fairness in marriage will prevail, both in jurisprudence and in practice, in Washington and in your town.

There is not a damned thing you can do about this. So go ahead and choose to piss away the gift of your own humanity if you like. It's your life.

Agony, Art, and Apple.

It is a cliché that artists are among the last-ditch truthtellers in a society. It is also true.

These days, for example, as corporate journalists become less willing and less able to contradict the ruling script of American life (e.g., there is no alternative to 21st-century monopoly capitalism as a way of running our country or organizing the world), it is increasingly the artists who help break the actual news about what is wrong and what change is possible.

Who is passionately exposing lies and delusions on the part of both the Obama corporatists and the dog-whistle right? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- comedians, for God's sake. Who wrote a famous open letter to Laura Bush declining her dinner invitation with the explanation that Ms. Bush had chosen to live in quiet harmony with a murderous and criminal regime? Internationally-celebrated poet Sharon Olds.

And who, now, is sending chills down corporate and consumer spines with his little one-man show about the people who actually make your iPhone? An overweight, nervy actor and monologist named Mike Daisey, whose theatrical monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," has brought audiences the story of Chinese workers leaping to their deaths from factory complex roofs to escape a wretched life in service to Apple. The New York Times and other corporate media have since picked up pieces of the story of how the electronics industry runs horrifically dangerous, hellishly abusive, city-sized factories. But it was a solo guy with a touring one-man show who told it.

It's one more reason why artists should have way more societal stature: they are among our default sources of truth when the official tellers choose to shut up.

Read on Daisey's blog how Apple is now acting very, very afraid of these revelations. And listen here to an edited live performance of Daisey's monologue aired on the radio show This American Life.

I'm interested in losers.

I think they are more interesting than winners.

Well, no, I don't mean exactly that. Because winners are interesting in unexpected ways, too. Winning, you realize, rarely turns out to be what the winner expects it to be.

But what I mean about losers is that they are so unexplored and under-exposed. A team or a candidate or a contestant wins The Big Prize and we learn all about their long struggle, their inspirational grandmother, their hard personal choices, their personal daily routine for getting up in the morning and making green tea or oatmeal and doing their Winning Work. Winners want to talk about being winners and reporters want to report about winners and readers and viewers want to know about winners. For a few days or months or years apiece, anyway.

But losers don't always want to talk about losing, and when they do we don't hear enough about it. And we should, because I think it tells us a lot more than winners do.

For one thing, one of the hidden truths about winners is that they were losers, sometimes for a very long time, before they were winners. They tried and lost, tried and lost, again and again, while nobody was watching. They were invisible to nearly all of us while they scuffled along, disheveled and disreputable, and for years and years they kept on doing what they did, in the shadows, for reasons that I'm betting would excite us and teach us a ton if we only knew. That is, before they were suddenly pronounced "winners" by TV hosts and media columnists.

Moreover, losers who never end up winning have a lifetime of that kind of story. Decades and decades of sacrifice and failure and delusion and hope and screaming fights in the kitchen and quiet -- or crazed -- acceptance. If they don't give up, anyway. And even if they do finally give up and let it all go, that in itself is a hell of a tale to be told.

I'm thinking about all of this because my town, Baltimore, is still in shock from watching the Ravens miss a chance to go to the Super Bowl this year after kicker Billy Cundiff missed a 32-yard field goal with 11 seconds left against the New England Patriots. For you non-footballers, translate 32 yards as "a kick you can make with your eyes closed." A newspaper photo showed Cundiff, moments after his life-altering miss, walking toward the sideline, head down, body deflated, the picture of numb defeat. News coverage in the following days had him saying all the true and expected things: he couldn't explain it, he had no excuses.

But that photo of Cundiff raised all the other questions for me: What happened when he and his wife put their kids to bed after that awful day and shut the door to their own bedroom and were alone together with that moment? How does he weave that reality of public failure and humiliation, the worst nightmare of his entire career as an athlete, into the fabric of what is meaningful in his life? How does he see himself? What does he need from his life partner and his friends? How, if at all, does it change who he becomes and what he builds? How does he carry it, use it, release it, feel it? How will it affect the next year, 10 years, entire remainder of his life?

That's what I want to know.

 

Good for the Penn State Board of Trustees for firing Joe Paterno

in the wake of the horrible sexual abuse scandal there. The entire situation is tragic, but the board acted promptly and rightly in asserting its authority at a school where, as with many big-time football powers, the coach and the athletic program are virtual deities.

In the case of the legendary Paterno, he is as iconic a coach as there is, with more wins than any other major college football coach and a well-deserved reputation as a football titan. But, like many titans, it appears he overestimated himself. He apparently thought he could still dictate the terms of his future at Penn State -- even after having displayed 10 years of reprehensible cowardice regarding the now-public allegations that former Penn State defensive coach and Paterno friend Jerry Sandusky sexually abused at least 8 boys. Essentially, after being told in 2002 by an eyewitness about Sandusky's allegedly sexually molesting a 10-year-old boy in the locker room shower, Paterno simply told his boss and then, when his superiors did nothing, kept his mouth shut for 10 years -- giving Sandusky a decade in which he allegedly continued to ruin more young lives through his access to young boys via a charity he runs for vulnerable youths. The university was sufficiently convinced of Sandusky's dangerousness to bar him from school locker room facilities -- but, for some odd reason, did not feel moved to protect potential victims outside of the university by going public with the embarrassing news about the allegations against one of their own.

Paterno's implicit message, as revealed in his own defense: Hey, I told my boss about this. I followed the rules. If they choose to hide the problem and not tell the police, why should I stick my neck out and bring down my football program by going to the police myself? Well, maybe now Joe realizes why he should have: because preventing 10 years of rapes of children is more important than protecting the brand name of Penn State football.

Paterno apparently thought he could outmaneuver the Board of Trustees by pre-emptively announcing yesterday that he would retire at the end of this season. But he badly underestimated them. The outraged board replied by swiftly and correctly handing Paterno his head, effective immediately, and by just as appropriately booting Penn State President Graham Spanier. Two of Paterno's bosses, Athletic Director Tim Curley and VP for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, have now been indicted for perjury and failing to report the incident to law enforcement. The grand jury says that Spanier also knew about the allegations against Sandusky and kept quiet, but at this point neither he nor Paterno have been indicted.

There are, of course, politics here. Paterno has been angering the board for years with his imperial behavior. His latest stunt, trying to escape the scandal via his sudden statement of retirement without consulting with the board, no doubt angered them more. And Paterno and President Spanier have reportedly tussled for power for years.

But the politics don't alter the facts. Paterno and Spanier are out on their ears because they failed the most basic test of responsibility for the welfare of young people and for the character of the university. And Curley and Schultz have been indicted because failing to be honest about an alleged sex crime on campus and to report it to authorities is, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general, illegal.

But what this is really about is that college football, at the big football schools, is a business. It pulls in big money from alumni benefactors. It generates media hype. It attracts students. It builds a college's brand. It is a collusion among frenetic high school and college coaches, see-no-evil college administrators, the NCAA, the NFL, and glory- and money-hungry athletes. It is an industry, and its ruthless needs trump quaint concerns like ethics, academics, respecting women, and safeguarding the interests of young people in general.

The most tragic thing about the Penn State debacle is that more young people were, according to the charges, set up to be sexually brutalized and traumatized in the ensuing years in part because a coach and several administrators were afraid to damage their venerated football program.

The second-most-tragic thing is that, in the midst of a Great Recession and the kinds of vast suffering and plutocratic brutality we've not seen since the 1930s, thousands of students at Penn State now feel moved to near-riots involving toppled lampposts and overturned cars not because American society is sinking toward peonage and fascism but because they are losing their football coach.

Penn State is perennially rated as one of the nation's top party schools by Princeton Review. It was ranked the #1 party school in 2009, when this episode of the popular radio program This American Life provided a glimpse into the circus-like aspects of student life there.

One can wonder, too, how administrators could have worked for 10 years to bury this awful Sandusky issue without word leaking out to anyone on the Board of Trustees. I mean, these are heavyweights we are talking about: the board's vice chairman, who made the announcement of Paterno's firing, is CEO of U.S. Steel, for God's sake.

Still, it's good to see that even as crowds rage on campus, the Penn State Board of Trustees appears to be awake, sober, and willing to act.